More than a decade ago Derek Sayer, a professor of history at Lancaster
University, published an immensely popular book entitle The Coasts of
Bohemia, which covers Czech history and culture from the mythical past all
the way until early twentieth century. Its readers have been eagerly
awaiting a continuation of the accessible and highly detailed work that
opened up Czech history to a wider audience. This year, professor Sayer
published a new work - ‘Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A
Surrealist History’, which focuses in on the Czech capital and the
tumultuous last century.

Derek Sayer, photo: Yoke-Sum Wong
I had a chance to speak to professor Sayer on his recent visit to Prague.
We began by talking about the strong statement that the title of the book
makes about the Czech capital.

“In a nutshell, it sounds absurd, and that’s in a way a part of it.
The title is taken from the German writer Walter Benjamin, who left Nazi
Germany and went to Paris in the 1930’s. He wrote a large book that
wasn’t actually published until years after his death, which looks at
Paris as the capital of the 19th century. And what he argues is that you
can find expressed in the architecture, the material culture and so on,
really the dreams of the 19th century. Paris was not the most important
city of the 19th century, commercially for example London was – but from
a cultural point of you it was.”

So, how would one determine the capital of the 20th century
then?

“Now, if you ask what would be an equivalent for the 20th century. The
most obvious answer would be New York City, for all sorts of very obvious
reasons. You then dig a bit further and say, in what sense does New York
actually typify the experience of the 20th century. Well, it hasn’t
experience fascism, hasn’t experienced communism, in fact it hasn’t
experienced a hell of a lot that much of the rest of the world has
experienced and that the century was actually defined by. Even though, it
was undoubtedly the commercial capital of the world and after World War
Two
became the artistic capital of the world.

“What’s interesting about Prague is that the history of the city over
that period – 1900 to the end of the century – really crystallizes so
much of what actually defined that century. If you about the fact that at
the start of the century it was a provincial town in a larger empire,
engaged in what later would come to be called national liberation
struggles. It achieves independence in 1918.

Photo: Princeton University Press
“In the interwar period, which what I concentrate on in particular in
the book, it was a real hotbed of modernism. There were attempts to be
build a new, modern, up-to-date western-facing state, and for 20 years it
really flourished. But there were also tensions – ethnic tensions, class
tensions and so on – going on at the time. ”

Prague lived through world war two, although it did escape the
terrible
destruction that many other European capitals faced. What makes it the
reflection of contemporary history in that period?

“The Munich Agreement could have been seen as one of the defining
features of the 20th century, not just for the Czechs. That effectively
brought the democratic Czechoslovakia to an end. The city was then the
longest to be occupied by the Germans of any European capital, with the
exception of Vienna.

“After the end of the war, I think I’m right in saying that
Czechoslovakia was the only country that actually elected into power the
government led by the Communist Party. Then as we all know two year later
there is a coup d’état and then 40 years of communism.

“The Czech experience of communism in some peculiar way also seems to
crystallize everybody’s experience. They had the nastiness of the gulag
and the show trials in the beginning of the 1950’s. They had probably
the
most advanced reform movement and cultural thaw in the 1960’s, leading
to
the events of ’68. And then they were occupied again.

“And for the next 20 years, while other countries in the rest of the
Eastern Bloc were gradually liberalizing, this place remained in a
deep-freeze for the best part of those 20 years. And then the Velvet
Revolution. Now, I forgot to mention the ethnic cleansing at the end of
World War Two when they kicked out three million Germans.

“If you put all of that together, it crystallizes, I would argue, much
that defines the 20th century, in particular the battle of the three great
potential social systems – communism, fascism and liberal democracy. And
that is reflected in the culture of the city, or the culture that the city
has produced – both the popular culture and the literary and artistic
culture. So that’s the territory that the book explores, but it
doesn’t
do it by advancing a grand argument.”

In terms of the dynamism of the age, of course the First Republic was
incredibly dynamic culturally and politically it was very unique in the
region. But some would argue that after ’48, some would argue that
culture here just stood still except for the brief period of the Prague
Spring. Wouldn’t that take Prague out of the running?

“No, it takes Prague out of the running only if you consider history as
something that is always going forward. On, I think, second to last page
of
the book, I actually say that it’s pretty clear by now that Prague is
not
a place in which history runs in straight lines. It is a place where the
past can unexpectedly return in all sorts of ways. In the 1950’s, which
was the high point of Stalinist communism, was also a point when they were
very busily reviving 19th century artists, writers, and so on.

“One of the things that I think makes Prague much more interesting to
study than most Western capitals is precisely this complexity. I say in
the
book that it is a place where the great dreams of progress, whether
they’re western-liberal type dreams or Marxist-communist dreams, have
again and again come apart, have unraveled.

Prague, photo: archive of Radio Prague
“And to your point. I used the term deep-freeze a few minutes ago, and
in many ways it was. Yet, bubbling away in all sorts of odd places, much
of
it after ’68 and in samizdat, was quite a lot of cultural ferment. And I
think it’s no accident that Prague was one place where the Surrealist
movement actually lasted in the underground, and is now probably the
strongest surrealist group in the world. That had something to do with the
political conditions of the time and what one could and couldn’t do.

“So what we have is actually have here is rather sophisticated social
and political theorizing, which possibly ought to be put side by side with
people like Foucault or whoever is studied degree programs in Britain or
the States. So, I think that the huge question mark of whether you can say
that there was anything progressive about the experience of communism, but
to say that nothing came out of the experience and the reflections on that
experience, I think, would be utterly wrong.

“Some of the darkest and funniest fiction by people like Bohumil Hrabal
– there is no way that could have been written were he not living in
absurdistan.”

And what do you make of Milan Kundera’s wish, which he expressed in
1984, that Czechoslovakia will one day re-enter Europe? Do you think that
Havel, Kundera and Hrabal will eventually not be looked at as parallel
Central-Eastern European writers but as just European writers?

“I don’t know. I’d like some of the to be simply seen as world
writers. Certainly, Kundera, I would put in that rank. With Hrabal it is
more difficult. For one thing, he is very difficult to translate well into
English.

Milan Kundera, photo: Jan Šmíd
“It’s been argued that Kundera and others operated with a somewhat
romanticized conception of Western culture. And that 1989 was in a lot of
ways a god-awful shock, because the Europe they went back into was
actually
just like Karlová ulice, which is a street I used to love when I lived
here, and it is now one of the tackiest streets in the world. And that
happened very quickly. I think now it’s not as bad as it was in the
mid-90’s, but it’s still bad.

“So there is an issue over the terms on which you come back into Europe.
But I am as interested in the other side of it, which is how does Europe
think of itself when it suddenly has to take in once again once a part
that
it’s tried to forget about for half a century and more. And that’s
interesting in a whole range of areas.”